Second weekend of September 2020
We’ve got a few more areas of the country opening today, and for those of you Los Angelenos that feel like a movie, the OC is now open. We’re still waiting for some big markets like NY, SF, Miami and LA to open (assuming LA and SF haven’t burned down), and a couple of them are head scratchers. In NY it seems as if someone at NATO might have kicked Gov Cuomo’s dog or something, since every business on par with Theaters (like Casinos?) were green lit for operations. In LA, California’s ’simplified’ rules for opening are being called complex by ex East German Bureaucrats, so who knows…. We’re still seeing a lot of signs that once things get back to normal (more on this below) we’ll see normal grosses on a national basis, but for now we’re still seeing studios do the best they can. In the meantime we’ll still see movies marketed in a way that is geared towards the current landscape, with more digital based campaigns and less TV. That makes sense because with digital you can geofence each market based on theaters being open or closed (with national TV you would just have a lot of waste), however digital marketing doesn’t seem to generate the grosses that TV does. All that being said, there’s still not much product out there, so it’s a great chance for these movies to ‘breathe’ and find an audience. So, based on something I heard from Bob Woodward’s talent booker, here’s my best take on the weekend box office.
Tenet - As I told you last week, I ventured down to Oceanside last Saturday to see this. It felt so good to be sitting in a real theater again, watching a movie that absolutely deserves to be seen on the big screen, I highly recommend going out of your way to do the same. Like we talked about last week, WB is keeping the grosses on this film to themselves, which is just fine with me. There was talk of them taking the wraps off the grosses after the first weekend, but since the press is still dying to make this (or anything related to theaters) seem ‘glass half empty’, why is it important? I’m sure they’ll eventually let all the data run free in the world, but as the only studio that took this big a risk on a film this expensive, I’m fine with them doing whatever they want (but only on this film).
The Broken Hearts Gallery - A hearty welcome and thank you to Sony for adding another release to the theaters. This well reviewed teen rom/com should do a little better than some of the similar skewing films we’ve seen since the theaters reopened. The upside here is that because the current lineup is a little short on comedy right now, whatever it does this weekend it should be around for a while.
After We Collided - Does anyone remember a little film from Aviron in April 2019 called After? Yeah, me neither* but although it only opened here to $6 million and finished at about $12 million, it ended up with a WW gross of about $60 million (off a $13 million prod budget). So they made a sequel (both films were based on novels), and because Canada has their exhibition sector pretty much fully open, it opened there today. What’s interesting here is that we’ve seen markets where after theaters open, it takes a couple of week for word to spread that going to the movies is still great and the grosses come back to normal. Looking at the grosses on this film compared to After in Canada, the screen average is actually a little higher than the first film. And the grosses in Quebec are really good, so another sign that after we’re open for a little while, moviegoing will be just fine.
As far as the holdovers, we’re seeing more resilience and very sight drops for the films audiences seem to like such as Unhinged, Personal History of David Copperfield and Words on Bathroom Walls.
- Sorry to all of you that used to work for Aviron, but I honestly had to look the movie up.